On Being with Krista Tippett

Neil Plantinger wrote that fun book a while back called It's not the way it's supposed to be and it's dealing with sin.

Neil Plantinger wrote that fun book a while back called it's not the way it's supposed to be and it's dealing with sin

In 2010, he wrote his own very moving memoir, Tattoos on the Heart, and more recently penned a terrific follow up, Barking to the Choir.

In 2010, he wrote his own very moving memoir called Tattoos on the Heart, The Power of Boundless Compassion.

I find your book, What Technology Wants, to be really important and thought provoking.

And I think if there's any piece of your work or thinking that we're going to dip into more, I think it's that one.

Also because you wrote it in 2010 and because of the pace of acceleration of our technologies.

And, you know, I find your book, What Technology Wants to be really important and thought provoking.

And because of the pace of acceleration of our technologies, I mean, the world has actually changed a lot in that time.

Her most recent book is The Gardener and the Carpenter, with the new science of child development tells us about the relationship between parents and children.

I think gardening is a very nice metaphor for, if you're trying to do this project, which I would like to do of really taking caring seriously from a scientific perspective and a philosophical perspective, trying to find good ways of talking about it that make it be other than just, just another kind of work.

And I think that kind of picture is much more like what goes on with caregiving for a next generation. Even if you could accomplish this end of shaping a child to come out a particular way, you would have defeated the whole point of childhood by doing that, because the whole point of childhood is to have each generation introduce new variability, new kind of noise and randomness and new possibilities.

the powerful presence of religious skepticism in India goes or at least may appear to go against a standard characterization of Indian culture which is exceedingly common that takes the form of focusing particularly on religion in interpreting Indian traditions

the religious connection is certainly there however these grand explorations of every possible religious belief coexist with deeply skeptical arguments that are also elaborately explored sometimes within the religious texts themselves going back all the way to the middle of the second millennium BCE

the so-called song of creation or the creation hymn as it sometimes called in the authoritative Vedas ends with the following radical doubts who really knows who will hear proclaim it whence was it produced whence is this creation the gods came afterwards with the creation of this universe who then knows whence it has arisen

there are in addition a great many controversies between defenders of religiosity on one side and advocates of general skepticism on the other the doubts sometimes take the form of agnosticism sometimes that of atheism but there is also Gautama Buddha's special strategy of combining his theoretical skepticism about God with a practical subversion of the significance of the question by making the choice of good behavior completely independent of any god real or imagined

the powerful presence of religious skepticism in India goes or at least may appear to go against a standard characterization of Indian culture which is exceedingly common that takes the form of focusing particularly on religion in interpreting Indian traditions

who really knows who will hear proclaim it whence was it produced whence is this creation the gods came afterwards with the creation of this universe who then knows whence it has arisen

The author of Housekeeping, Gilead, Home and Absence of Mind, which is the book that we're going to focus on especially tonight.

And that's the reason I've written a new book called A Book of Blessings called To Bless the Space Between Us. It'll be out here in the middle of February, early March.

he describes this kind of nausea at existence and I felt that also feeling the sense of great dread and fear.

he describes this kind of nausea at existence and I felt that also feeling the sense of great dread and fear.

He's also well known for his work in Social Contagion, Behavioral Contagion, which he brought to bear in his most recent 2020 book, Apollo's Arrow, the Profound and Enduring Impact of Coronavirus on the Way We Live.

And when I describe Christian science, I know I'll probably offend Christian science by doing this, but this is the way I've always considered it is it's kind of like the movie The Matrix.

I can still hear her perfectly graveled alto on the other end of the phone, maternal, weathered and as tough as nails. Right? That doctor you trust telling me that everything was going to be okay and that God loved me to this day.

The human mind is an elaborate, ever changing human palace and that it has all these secret passageways we have yet to comprehend.

So the foundation of what we consider medicine is, is it better than your own mind? Which is kind of not... Which it often isn't.

So yeah, if I just, if I just ask you to start talking about the religious background of your childhood, how you would describe that now.

If you read my book, what you'll learn is this actually does work. Now there are limits to it, but it, I mean, and this, this is a theme I saw throughout working on this book and in my career is people are not crazy.

And in my book, I go into all these different cultures and the different stories, how that changes in different places and what other people find, um, interesting.

I can still hear her perfectly graveled alto on the other end of the phone, maternal weathered and as tough as nails, right. That doctor you trust, um, telling me that everything was going to be okay and that God loved me to this day. It's the most comforting voice I can imagine.

The human mind is an elaborate, ever-changing human palace and that it has all these secret passageways we have yet to comprehend.

Our choices make more of a difference today than they ever have.

What a magnificent time to be alive because we truly can make such a difference. That what we do matters so much.

When we actually start talking about real solutions, and that's the Yale survey that you referred to that I talk about in the book. When we ask people about real solutions, everybody's on board.

So I had to ask myself, well, where do I find hope?

So I had to figure out the answer to that. So I thought, well, a climate scientist is a good person to ask, because if there's anyone who could and should be hopeless, it's us.

So my new book is called "Saving Us", because it's not about saving the planet. It is literally about us.

I decided to conduct a little experiment one time and give a presentation to an audience of a few hundred water managers who I knew would be sort of a little not too sure about this whole climate change thing.

But because I had not said those words, she had been able to listen to what I was actually saying without tripping over the language.

when we ask people about real solutions, everybody's on board. Everybody says, heck yes, I would love to do that.

I'm asking people to help change the world.

Leon wrote a book called The God Particle. And that was the first time I heard the expression described.

And the reason why this name seemed appropriate is because this, the Higgs particle, the Higgs boson, as we'd like to call it, is we believe responsible for the creation of mass for everything else in the universe.

Leon wrote a book called The God Particle.